Psychology of Language department, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Wundtlaan 1, P.O. Box 310, 6500 AH, Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
Language and Speech Laboratory, Universidad del País Vasco, calle Justo Vélez de Elorriaga 1, Vitoria, 01006, Spain.
J Acoust Soc Am. 2020 Feb;147(2):721. doi: 10.1121/10.0000646.
Speakers adjust their voice when talking in noise, which is known as Lombard speech. These acoustic adjustments facilitate speech comprehension in noise relative to plain speech (i.e., speech produced in quiet). However, exactly which characteristics of Lombard speech drive this intelligibility benefit in noise remains unclear. This study assessed the contribution of enhanced amplitude modulations to the Lombard speech intelligibility benefit by demonstrating that (1) native speakers of Dutch in the Nijmegen Corpus of Lombard Speech produce more pronounced amplitude modulations in noise vs in quiet; (2) more enhanced amplitude modulations correlate positively with intelligibility in a speech-in-noise perception experiment; (3) transplanting the amplitude modulations from Lombard speech onto plain speech leads to an intelligibility improvement, suggesting that enhanced amplitude modulations in Lombard speech contribute towards intelligibility in noise. Results are discussed in light of recent neurobiological models of speech perception with reference to neural oscillators phase-locking to the amplitude modulations in speech, guiding the processing of speech.
说话者在噪声中说话时会调整自己的声音，这种现象被称为 Lombard 语音效应。这些声学调整有助于在噪声中理解语音，相对于正常语音（即在安静环境中产生的语音）而言。然而，究竟是 Lombard 语音的哪些特征导致了在噪声中提高了语音的可理解性，目前还不清楚。本研究通过证明以下几点，评估了增强的幅度调制对 Lombard 语音可理解性增益的贡献：（1）在噪声环境中，荷兰语母语者在奈梅亨 Lombard 语音语料库中产生的幅度调制比在安静环境中更明显；（2）在语音感知实验中，更明显的幅度调制与可理解性呈正相关；（3）将 Lombard 语音的幅度调制移植到正常语音上会导致可理解性提高，这表明 Lombard 语音中的增强幅度调制有助于提高噪声中的可理解性。研究结果结合了最近的神经生物学言语感知模型进行了讨论，这些模型涉及到神经振荡器对言语幅度调制的相位锁定，从而指导言语的处理。
